


Bird Set Free

by Kanthia



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Gen, Spoilers, Swearing, pre-DSOD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-29 16:31:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19404172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kanthia/pseuds/Kanthia
Summary: On Kaiba Corp’s dime the CEO-slash-majority-shareholder takes the Duel Monsters Grand Champion (and, informally, King of Games) out to lunch, and they discuss some shared ghosts.





	Bird Set Free

It’s Mokuba’s idea because _of course_ it’s Mokuba’s idea, to have Kaiba Corp sponsor Yugi Mutou for an interview with everyone’s favourite trashy rag, _Duel Monsters International_. The notoriety he earned from Duelist Kingdom and Battle City and the Kaiba Corporation Grand Championship has been compounded by how few other public appearances he’s made; what really was just the natural byproduct of a busy academic schedule and, y’know, repeatedly saving the world from the malevolent forces of evil has been interpreted by rabid fans as reclusiveness, and only worked to increase his renown. The world wants a piece of him, and Kaiba Corp -- whether or not it has the _personal_ blessing of its CEO -- is all too happy to provide.

So they get him into a suit and sit him down with an all-too-eager interviewer who stutters with excitement, and Yugi answers all their questions with his trademark blend of soft-spoken patience and eager intensity: yes, he’s still actively duelling; no, he has retired the God Cards; no, the Dark Magician is no longer his ace; yes, he’s rebuilt his deck.

Why? Oh (and he smiles and tilts his head, here), it just felt like time for a fresh start.

The makeup team powders him to high heaven and the photographer gets his best angle and Seto, off to the side sipping angrily at his fifth (sixth?) shot of espresso that morning fumes at just how small the kid is. He’d bested tycoons and professionals and maniacs and _his own damn stepfather_ , only to get his ass repeatedly handed to him by some eleventh grader running a two-bit game store owner’s outdated deck, minus the Blue-Eyes and all the pieces of Exodia.

\-- With the help of the ghost inside his necklace, of course. Can’t forget all the ancient Egyptian bullshit that kept interfering with actual, legitimate duels.

Business acumen states that you treat your sponsee to a post-interview meal, so on Kaiba Corp’s dime the CEO-slash-majority-shareholder takes the Duel Monsters Grand Champion (and, informally, King of Games) out to lunch. It’s around the time that the first round of tapas arrives that Seto realizes that regular high school students might be more accustomed to burgers and french fries and that sort of plebian garbage.

“It’s popular in Europe,” Seto says, not in the mood to give any more of an excuse. “Take what you want. We can order more.”

“Gotcha,” Yugi says, and helps himself.

They eat their way in silence through a flatbread course and a course of aromatic mushrooms followed by a tartare of ahi tuna and mango that arrives with a deceptively simple-looking egg fried rice, Yugi sampling everything and Kaiba sticking with his favourites (red meat, red wine, oden when the paparazzi aren’t watching, bitter vegetables when Mokuba is watching).

Any idiot might mistake Yugi’s subdued affect for meekness, or shyness, or inexperience; Seto himself made that fatal error all those years ago, when he’d assumed that Exodia was out of reach of the unwashed masses. That softspoken nature, rather, belies an overwhelming confidence -- and only with having known him for so long can Seto see that, though with the benefit of hindsight it seems obvious. Yugi is not easily intimidated, and does not need to put on airs.

The intermediary course arrives -- a palette cleanser, two dessert spoons each with a mouthful of a delicate sorbet of medjool dates. The irony is not lost on Seto, nor on Yugi, from the look in his eyes.

“He meant to say goodbye,” Yugi says, taking his share. “Neither of us thought there’d be so little time at the end.”

“How sweet.”  
  
“-- To you, as well.”

Seto makes a noise that he hopes Yugi thinks is noncommittal. “What would a guy like that have to say to me?”

“Thanks, mostly. And sorry.”

Now Seto can’t hide his surprise. “Sorry?”

“For what happened outside Pegasus’ castle. He always regretted what he did that day. -- To both of us.”  
  
In his youth and arrogance Seto had gambled his life on Yugi’s timidity, had staked Mokuba’s immortal soul on what he’d hoped was a schoolboy’s inability to act when the chips were down. What an imbecile he’d been.

\-- For not accounting for the ghost in the necklace, that is.

“I’m not -- I wasn’t angry at him.”

“Yeah, but he was.”

Little people like to accuse Seto of being imperceptive, but you don’t take a company out from under the feet of the likes of Gozaburo and his board of directors without being able to read right through someone with a single glance and a well-prepared dossier. Yugi had always been his biggest mistake.

“-- Whatever. It was idiotic of me to push him like that.”  
  
They had both been his biggest mistake. Seto had gone looking into the unassuming owner of a local game shop in his search for the fourth Blue Eyes, had known that it was passed to Solomon from one Arthur Hawkins, fellow Egyptologist, but had never bothered to dream that the link to the past went any deeper than that.

“You didn’t know. I didn’t know. -- _He_ didn’t know that what he was doing was wrong. When he first woke in me he didn’t know who he was, so he assumed he was me -- and all he knew in that moment was that he needed to win at any cost to save my grandfather, and you were in his way.”

(It went much deeper than that.)

“Hm.”

“ -- What did it look like?”

“Pardon?”

“What did it look like, when he became me? I’d never -- watched it happen.”

It’s hard to see something when you don’t believe in it. For example, if you don’t believe in bullshit, it’s easy to miss a kid get possessed by the soul of a Pharaoh thousands of years old.

Instead, Seto shrugs. “Looked like you’d stopped slouching.” Gozaburo had taught him, early on, that everyone had a tell: some way to know that they were about to cut the crap and get to the point. “In a blink you’d look like you’d gotten serious.”

“At first we wouldn’t remember anything, I’d wake up the next morning with blood under my fingernails and not know why. Then you showed him what Duel Monsters could really be…” Yugi puts down the slice of gruyere he’d been contemplating. “I think it made him remember something, or at least gave him something to centre himself on. He started changing.”  
  
Another seafood course, a selection of prawns and squid fried teriyaki-style. Seto takes one to avoid supplying a response; he has no idea what to say.

Instead, he lets his curiosity take the wheel: “How did you know?”  
  
Yugi raises his eyebrows, and smiles the slightest smile. He knows that Seto is meandering towards a comfortable conversation, and that’s no small victory. “He’d let me in. -- Imagine your heart’s an empty room, and it gets, um, decorated based on your personality.” He places a palm over his own heart. “It’s different for everyone, but it’s always one room. But my heart had a corridor, me to the left, him to the right...”

Inevitably, Seto’s mind wanders to what his own room might look like: computers, Duel Monsters cards, a single chessboard. Clean and tidy like his office, with a couch for Mokuba.

“And?”  
  
“And we met in the middle. There was -- when he took over, it was like I was at an intersection, a meeting-place, and then he'd cross over."

Yes, there had been brief moments when Seto had noticed as much: flashes of what felt like insight or instinct, when it seemed like Yugi was casting two shadows.

"-- But it took time. He was -- scared. Confused.”

That puts Kaiba in a direct collision course with a very troublesome thought.

“There was…”  
  
Yugi looks up at him, waiting. So say that you decide to believe that all of that ancient Egyptian mumbo-jumbo was real, and the immortal soul of a nameless Pharaoh really had been riding Yugi’s body. Seto had held steadfast to his rational disbelief through Duelist Kingdom, and Ishizu’s history lesson, and the way he understood the text on the Winged Dragon of Ra, and all that nonsense with Dartz -- because if he believed any of that, he’d be forced to believe what the other Yugi had said --

“When you -- when he --” Seto feels his brow furrow. “When he summoned Exodia, he told me I needed to open my mind. Something appeared on his forehead, and…”

“Mm. He called it the Eye of Anubis. Early on, when he didn’t know what he was, he knew he had an interest in judging hearts. I think yours was the last one he tried to fix.”

“He didn’t --”  
  
“-- I know.”

A steak course arrives, whiskey-marinated medallion of sirloin with onion and paprika. Yugi picks at his. Seto eats his in silence, turning over what Yugi had said, and the strange nightmares he’d had after the duel with Exodia; he’d dreamed he was a little orphan boy again putting together the shattered pieces of his own heart. Assembling a puzzle in the dark. He’d had that dream until the day he’d rescued Mokuba from Pegasus.  
  
The question then becomes: is his heart really his own, or has it been irrevocably damaged? (changed? fixed?)  
  
The miso soup that ends the meal is delightful. Seto hails the waiter and hands him a note to pass to the chef.  
  
(Of course, there's no way to ask him now, now that he's gone.)

“Regardless, we’re all better people for knowing him,” Yugi says, as Seto signs the bill. “And I think he was better for knowing us.”

“And after all that you just let him go.”

(There is a vacancy in the house of Yugi Motou’s soul, a cage that blew open in Egypt. Did it set its prisoner free, or did it let its prisoner escape?)

Yugi blinks. For a moment, in his wide eyes, Seto sees not a world-class duellist, but a kid in the eleventh grade who, according to a permanent record hidden behind a laughably weak firewall, is not very good at algebra. “I had to.”

“Did you, though?”  
  
There’s a moment that passes between them, an unspoken energy closest in kin to the way the air felt when they’d dueled: Kaiba is turning into himself, and Yugi is reading him regardless. That ability to read people when they least want him to is what makes him so dangerous: the infuriating empathy that, when applied with a little strategy, makes him such a formidable duelist.

That’s what had defeated Atem.

“I did,” he says, finally. “It was his time. You don’t understand --”  
  
To hell with all this nonsense about destiny!  
  
“-- Don’t give me lip about not understanding. I understand perfectly, Mutou. You were afraid, and you let him walk away.”

\-- But if he walked away, if death’s a place you can walk away to --  
  
_\-- if death’s just a place you can walk to --_

“I’m going to find him.”  
  
“Kaiba --”  
  
“With or without you, Mutou.” Empathy be damned. Seto is most feared for something else: the ruthless pursuit of his goals at the cost of all else.

“Without me,” Yugi agrees, standing up. “Thanks for the meal.”

_You’re welcome._

**Author's Note:**

> yugi: kaiba no
> 
> kaiba, climbing into a jet plane shaped like a blue eyes white dragon: kaiba yes
> 
> Find me on [tumblr](https://kanthia.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
